There are bars on our windows, which seems like a bad thing to some people, but it’s pretty typical for a ground-level apartment in DC. They’re tasteful bars, slender and black, twisted into heart-like swirl shapes where they meet in the middle. I’m sitting here on the couch watching a blizzard pour down, framed by those window bars. Feeling all warm, safe, and fuzzy in the grand scheme of things — my kitchen is full of non-perishable food, so I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to.
Purchasing that food at Trader Joe’s last night on my way back from work was CRAZY though. I think everybody in the world (or at least Northern Virginia) had the same great idea to stock up on organic frozen pizzas and meatballs right before the storm. I had to cruise around the super-narrow parking lot forever and then once I actually parked and got in, I barely nabbed the very last of my favorite things. It will be nice to have that food when I get back from Oregon, too, so we don’t have to do a grocery run first thing.
The snow can’t decide which way it wants to fall. It all floats left sometimes, then right, then scatters every which way. It’s thick, however, and constant, and since it started around 10pm last night has deposited at least a foot of itself on the fence and yard and window frame. If our window-box herb garden had any spark of life left yesterday (Brendan stopped tending and watering them when they started dying in the colder weather), that’s been both frozen and suffocated at this point.
I wonder if I’ll make it to work on Monday. The snow is supposed to stop, and it should be sunny and marginally above freezing on both Sunday and Monday, but there is a lot on the ground that needs to get shoveled or melted. It being Christmas week, it’s totally acceptable to work from home on Monday, so I have options. I parked my car on the street and left myself extra room so I could pull straight out, rather than reverse-parallel-parking, which is hard to do in snow. My flight to Oregon is on Tuesday after work, but I have some choices there as well. If I still don’t want to drive out to Virginia at that point I can leave my car here and take the bus out. My original and first-choice plan is to park at work, which is relatively near the airport, and taxi out to Dulles, which gives me a great combination of free parking and not waiting for a bus when I come back.
I am SO excited for Christmas. I’ll be in Oregon from Tuesday to Tuesday, which is a suitably long vacation to settle in. I wasn’t able to make it back for Thanksgiving, so I’m excited to see everybody, it’s been a while. (Just so you don’t feel sorry for me, I ate perfectly good turkey legs and sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving, and the following week we drove up to New York for a huge Friendsgiving dinner with the Vassar crew.) Brendan is already gone to San Francisco for the holidays. He was here in DC alone last year, so it was important for him to get back and be with his family. I guess some people think it’s weird that we’re doing our holidays in different places, but we spend pretty much every other day of the year together. It makes sense to me that we’d each want to see our own families.
That’s all here. I need to do a massive clean-up of the apartment so it’s sparking for our post-holiday return. Nothing worse than having to scrub things after a vacation. Just wanted to let you know that I’m safe and sound in the middle of this blizzard, I still have heat and internet and food and at this point it’s more pretty than anything. It may be a different story on Monday when I have to dig my car out, but for now I’m going to munch on my granola, drink some hot cocoa, and feel all cozy inside my little snow globe of an apartment.
Posted by anna @ 6:23 pm
comments ?My car came back from the body shop yesterday. She’s still a little scuffed up (most notably some scratches on the one door’s inside plastic bits) but the real damage is repaired and she’s a LOT cleaner than she was before. If my parents haven’t forwarded these pictures to you yet, I got attacked by a Giant Metal Thing:
Now, this isn’t my finest photography work, I will admit that, but keep in mind it was pouring rain and 40+mph winds at 8am on a Thursday. I very much expected to be on my way to work. I shot a bunch of better photos with my fancy digital camera, except I didn’t have the data card in it. So those didn’t turn out so good.
Please note, in the first picture, the presence of an odd tarp-like thing draped over top of my car. That’s the whole story, right there. The Giant Metal Thing was supposed to be holding that tarp up; they’re tied together. Unfortunately my parking landlords don’t really understand how tarps work when they’re full of water (they tend to tug at their anchors). Don’t worry, this happened overnight, and I wasn’t sleeping in my car. The Nissan was the only victim.
Anyway, my car is back and fixed and cleaner than I’ve ever seen it. Really, the window is the best possible place that motorcycle trailer hitch could have attacked. So it’s a happy story, in the end. And there are more happy stories to come, as I try really hard to blog more. Next up, The Tale of the Baby Mug Bowls.
I can’t even tell you how exciting this city/workaholic life is.
Posted by anna @ 5:36 am
Filed under: Life
comments ?Astorians are few and far between in DC (at least the Oregon variety), which makes it that much nicer to see a familiar face. Luke, one of my dear friends from high school, has been enjoying a great deal of musical success lately, and I shared a taste of his good luck last night when his band performed at the Black Cat, just down the street from my apartment. Brendan, Frannie and I went down for the show (which lived up to glowing reviews) and even got a chance to chat Luke up (which warmed my heart), so it was an all-around good night. It was a brief reunion, they’re off to Philadelphia and beyond, but it was enough to recharge my nostalgia banks for a little while.
The band, Blind Pilot, has been doing wildly well. Luke met up with them while they were still practicing in the old red cannery building in Astoria, back before the big storm, and it was just another of Luke’s seemingly infinite lucky breaks (this should read as wonderment, not resentment). I don’t know what order it all happened in, but they toured down the coast to California by bike and reached #1 iTunes download and conducted all sorts of adventure and mischief. It should be noted that Luke plays an upright bass in this band, and that he somehow transported it hundreds of miles via bike. This has all culminated in a UK tour that they’ve just returned from and a US tour opening for the Decemberists and now headlining gigs of their own.
The music is pretty and poetic, almost too delicate for a lot of the venues they’re playing in, but fundamentally enjoyable. The Black Cat is a fun half-bar half-dancefloor space, and though the acoustics weren’t ideal the performance was great. Israel’s voice is beautiful, the instruments sounded lush, and they were all clearly having a blast. I was surprised by how active Luke was on stage, taking up the microphone and chatting with the audience between songs. He has always loved performing, but it’s like he fed off the crowd as he grinned and tossed jokes, periodically dropping his gaze and rubbing his hair in that classic way. I wonder how he catapulted to that frontman-type role, but he played it well.
Brendan and I met up with Luke after the performance and grabbed a couple beers in the backstagey area and did a quick exchange of recent events. He asked about our friends, though he was more up-to-date than I was on most of the news. He seemed older than I remember (from two years ago, imagine), at least calmer and more content. It could have just been exhaustion from being carted around in a van for days of hours, but I felt like the intervening years have provided some resolution to his search, whatever it was for exactly, love or direction or approval. I’ve brushed up against so many new people and places and ideas since high school, but when I see people like Luke I feel like I am reintroduced to that old world and my old place in it. Of course these friends have changed, too, but it’s still possible to look back together on a common memory that can’t quite be recalled alone. It doesn’t take much, a small gesture or smell, a raised eyebrow, and that other world rushes back along with this new world and all the transition points between them, and life is that much richer for having friends to share it with.
Posted by anna @ 5:54 am
Filed under: Life
1 commentIt’s strange to think how American my life is right now, at least compared with the leisurely day-to-day pace in Norway last year. I wake up early to run on a treadmill before wolfing down some Kix or, if I was slow at the gym, grabbing an apple on my way out the door. I work from sometime before 9am to sometime around 6:30pm on an average day, though it gets later when projects are due. There’s a lunch break in there, usually microwaved leftovers and a free diet Pepsi from the office fridge, but I usually eat it at my desk. The commute is an hour each way, so I only eat dinner before 9pm by the grace of a supportive boyfriend, who does most of the cooking after his own long day at school (or summer vacation, as the current case may be). I wrap it up with a movie or a readthrough of the news, and then I do my best to sleep.
Of course that’s slightly exaggerated. I only really make it to the gym every other day. Still, the weekends are a brief blessing, and with the sunny weather they’ve been filled with day trips and hikes and picnics. This weekend we explored some new sections of Rock Creek Park (I live next to a rather sizable forest, which is a pretty neat perk for a city). We also explored Charlottesville, touring Monticello and the University of Virginia, both of which were exceedingly lush and beautiful. During the course of that trip I decided that I would very much like to sit in on a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Grandpa Tom. I feel like they would have a lot to talk about. Adventures and time-travel fantasies aside, I still haven’t figured out how squeeze in all the routine extracurriculars I’d like to. I’m barely three chapters into the book Brendan gave me for my birthday, and I have writing projects piling up above my ears. I keep thinking I should bring my little voice recorder in the car with me so I can dictate ideas to myself, since they’re just spilling over and evaporating. I guess I could store them in my blog if I wasn’t so busy neglecting it.
What else is there? I took a wonderful trip home for Mother’s Day. I didn’t make it to Eugene, which was disappointing, but I accomplished quite a bit for a last-minute surprise visit. It was an immense relief to see Grandma Edith’s health returning. I’m a little embarrassed that I let that situation shake me up so badly, because I do pride myself in keeping a level head when other people are going through things, but I had been away from home for too long to be rational. Just one weekend of seeing the family, of eating together and going to church, filled my reservoirs up, and I can only hope I wasn’t too big a nuisance in return. I’m already planning my trip back in July, and this time I am going to make sure I get around the whole state and hug all of my grandmothers.
It’s not that I’m homesick, but the distance makes Oregon that much sweeter a destination. I am still settling in here and building up a life between the cracks of the routine. A young couple bought the pizza place that we go to for Wednesday wine night, but they’re maintaining the menu and prices and wine deal so I continue to support them. I bought a used bike, a pastel purple Schwinn, that I’m hoping to test out this weekend. It’s a steel road bike from the ’80’s (?), and I’ll have to learn how to work its crazily-placed gear shifters (they’re in the very middle part of the handlebar).
Erin May came to visit me the other week! It was wonderful to see her, she is in great health and spirits. She actually picked me up from the airport when I flew back from Oregon. She was a dream of a houseguest, perky and helpful and full of all those sweet, amusing little stories about our college experience that I have already managed to forget. I need friends who are as smart and patient as she is, because otherwise I think I’d just float away from reality. At least, reality as I experienced it two minutes ago. I notice this at work, too, that at some point I evaluate the same thing over again like new…which leads me to be very detailed but also, sometimes, inconsistent. I’m pretty convinced that my friends and family have all figured out at this point that I’m crazy. They put up with it pretty well.
Lately I’ve also been trying to sketch out a rough 5-year plan. It’s hard! I’d like to squeeze in some more school before I get old, but what kind of school? Business school? Law school? A Master’s program? Schools are so location-based, and there’s a juggling act between where I want to be now and in the future (the end goal is always the West Coast, but those pesky unemployment rates are so high over there!). I need to do a lot more research and ace some exams and get accepted to some schools before I can really start to worry, but just the spectre of life-impacting decisions is enough to get me worked up.
That’s actually all of May that I described right there. Oh, and Brendan had a birthday. Now that’s really it. I can’t believe it’s actually over because I really feel like I just got paid for April. I’ll still accept the May paycheck and everything, I’m just not entirely convinced that all those weeks actually happened. We must have skipped one. I’ll have to dig my heels in to slow the summer down before it starts snowing again.
Posted by anna @ 5:49 am
1 commentWe planned this weekend’s trip to the Air and Space Museum Annex a few days beforehand, we couldn’t have anticipated the coincidence. We’d been wanting to go and we had errands to run in Northern Virginia so we set Saturday afternoon aside. Even just after the accident the irony didn’t sink in, not until I was there, surrounded by every possible variation of airplane, from that nuke-dropping superfortress and the SR-71 Blackbird to human-sized stunt planes and dissected engines and gliders and flimsy prototype helicopters and the practice space shuttle Enterprise. The point was hammered home with no pretense of subtlety when my phone rang, just in front of the showcase on Japanese stewardesses. For the next ten minutes, as I wandered under a three-dimensional puzzle of suspended airplanes, Mom described the scene on the docks as they pulled Bill’s plane out of the Columbia River.
Nobody died, I should start with that. Nobody bothered to start the story that way for me. All I got was a quick: “Call me back, I need to tell you what happened with Uncle Bill’s airplane.” And she hung up. This was Friday night, and I spent the last bit of a delicious sushi dinner listening to blood pump behind my eyeballs. Minutes later I got the whole story. Grandma was wet and Bill bit his lip, but he made a perfect water landing. Mechanical failure: cause unknown. They came down from cruising altitude, some thousands of feet, and landed no more than a sled ride down the hill from my house, in the river.
It’s a good story, I suppose, with its happy end and all, but I can’t get over how horrific it all is. The airplane was brand new and, from all accounts, beautiful. Leather seats, TVs, fancy nav, some kind of absurdly lightweight carbon frame. This thing was so new I haven’t seen it, I just haven’t been home in a couple months. You might have a mental picture of some rich exec character and his private jet coated in slimy opulence, but that’s wrong. Bill is one of the most sincere, unaffected people I know. This plane represented something to him, a confluence of technology and achievement and joy. It allowed for small family luxuries, like quick weekend visits between Grandma and her youngest grandchildren. This crash is nothing less than a betrayal – like one of those stories where a well-loved pet turns on its owner.
Then there’s the image of them standing on the wing in the water. The Daily A quotes Grandma as saying her shoes were dry at first but that the water eventually reached her ankles. My grandmother cannot swim. She had to get a special medical waiver to avoid the swimming requirement and graduate from college. She put all of her grandchildren in lessons from the time we could crawl, so we would never be so terrorized, but she doesn’t even wade. I can’t even imagine that experience, knowing I’d survived 85 years plus a plane crash only to feel that inky water lapping at my ankles.
By all accounts, Bill did everything he could have. As soon as the plane shut down he spun it around, hoping to make it back to the airport. When he calculated coming up short he aimed for the river, picking a stretch of water just in front of two docked Coast Guard ships. He talked Grandma through the landing and evacuation plan and even broke the pressure seal on the door so they wouldn’t get trapped. They hit the water twice, one jarring bump and then a short skid. The bar pilot office is right there, too, and the pilot on duty perches at a full wall of plate-glass windows overlooking the river. He had called 911 and fired up his boat before the plane even stopped moving. If Grandma hadn’t grabbed the life ring (a ridiculous thing to decline, at the time) she wouldn’t have even gotten wet past her socks (as it was, she was towed through the water and hoisted up the side of the boat). They roped the plane to keep it from sinking. My dad arrived shortly thereafter at the scene of a disaster averted.
This is not a story about me at all, but I feel awful. Everybody has a nightmare of plummeting out of the sky, but this time it actually happened. I feel even worse that I wasn’t there, that I’m still not there as the pain and regret and relief and gratitude bubbles up and around my family. Dad made Grandma clam chowder from scratch and Mom made the bar pilots a couple batches of cookies, and all that homemade loving just sounds delicious. It’s not that I’m unhappy in DC, I am doing better than I even expected to, but sometimes I feel so guilty and selfish for being so far away. Couldn’t I do just as well in Portland, where I could drop by on weekends and help out in hard times?
I think it’s human nature to be this selfish, to wrap a tragedy around your own nightmares and insecurities, but it hadn’t happened to me yet at the Air and Space Annex. The shock was still fresh, the morning after, and very abstract. Wandering among all manner of air and space craft I couldn’t help but dwell on how bizarre it all is. How is it that people can build a machine that can cross the entire country in less than two hours and then, using that same logical muscle, strap themselves into it? I can’t even put fancy words on how disorienting it is to look up at the Enola Gay and imagine it as the vehicle it was, the ultimate instrument of death. This plane crash, too, was a rumor I’d heard, as abstract in its magnitude as if everybody had died after all. And yet, these were both more real than rumors because the implications rippled out beyond my disbelief. Inexplicable things happen every day, even to good people.
Posted by anna @ 4:34 am
1 comment